buttons & knobs

WilliamHazard · 2023-09-12T17:49:53.374Z

buttons & knobs

a collection of boilerplate GUI elements for SuperCollider, to be reused and repurposed as needed for sc scripts

Screenshot 2023-09-12 at 1.38.54 PM1688×1712 145 KB

I’m currently working on a project with a group of high school students that involves creating our own instrument in SuperCollider. To facilitate this process, I created several “boilerplate” scripts that include chunks of code we can repurpose to suit the students’ needs and desires for this instrument, in order to minimize friction, soften the learning curve (which is already quite steep for this age group, though they’ve been champs about it so far), minimize the time we spend in the coding weeds, and maximize the time we spend getting creative with sound and interface design. This script is one such “boilerplate” collection. I thought it might be useful outside of the context I’d written it for originally, for anyone who makes instruments in SuperCollider, as a way to construct GUIs a little more quickly and easily. Here, you’ll find:

a resizeable, always-on-top window with a black background (by default, it’s what I consider big enough to be useable but small enough to allow live coding in scIDE while the GUI window is open)
64 knobs
32 momentary buttons and 32 toggle buttons, arranged in alternating rows of 16
16 vertical sliders
1 horizontal slider
some commented-out lines to randomize the color of all of the above GUI elements

Requirements

a computer with SuperCollider installed

Download

v0.0.1 - available on GitHub

infinitedigits · 2023-09-12T20:33:02.538Z

thanks for sharing this, the code is really nice and concise and easy to follow. I was just thinking about making a little ui today and got put off by having to re-learn some gui stuff, but this makes it so easy.

WilliamHazard · 2023-09-12T23:34:31.399Z

so so glad to hear this was helpful! That’s exactly what I made it for – I knew I was not going to want to have to remember or re-learn this stuff while trying to keep activities with the high schoolers engaging at the same time. I’m excited to see what you’ve got cookin in sc these days